Road Trip Reality - 2

Empire of Pain

One of the things about being English and visiting America is the preconceived idea that you will feel at home there. After all, we share a common language and sometimes a common ancestry. Also, if you are a child of the Seventies, you will have been raised on a constant diet of American television shows. It’s why I’m still fascinated by the alleyways between all the shops in American towns. Iron, fire escapes laddering down buildings, piles of cardboard boxes stuffed beneath them and weirdly low hanging telephone wires criss crossing the sky all speak to me. All it needs is Starskey and Hutch to come belting down in hot pursuit of a criminal, guilty of wearing an overloud tartan jacket with a fur collar. You don’t get that in Leicester city centre. Although since visiting America and realising how slowly most people drive, it does give a very different perspective to movie car chases. I’d probably be quite good at an American high speed pursuit and I drive like a granny.

For me there was also the books. Back in the day, children’s publishing was nothing like the behemoth it is now. English writers were much thinner on the ground and the bulk of our native literature was old fashioned stuff like Arthur Ransome and Enid Blyton. All the modern kids’ books I read, with a few, notable exceptions, were by either Scandinavian or American authors. I loved the magical worlds of Astrid Lindgren and Tove Jansson, but for real life it had to be Judy Blume and for the horrors of every day, you had to go a long way to beat the urban weirdness of Paul Zindel.

I grew up then, with an understanding of Hershey’s Kisses and Twinkies, of fire hydrants and sky scrapers, of station wagons and saddle shoes. These all sounded extraordinary to me and I wanted to experience them in real, actual life. Real, actual, American life sounded far more exciting to me than boring, ordinary, English life. To me, growing up, it felt like the difference between technicolour and black and white. It doesn’t need saying that America was the one definitely and aggressively living its life in full colour.

The first time I went to America, I went to New York. It was everything I imagined and like nothing I had conceived of, all at the same time. Instead of feeling comfortable there, I have never felt so much a foreigner, before or since. It was the most alien place I have ever been. There was a constant sense of disconnect. I would be thinking: ‘Oh, I know this place/word/thing’ and then immediately feel a swooping sensation of not knowing anything at all. I have felt more at home in a medieval, mountain village in Sicily than I have in Central Park. It’s a feeling I get every time I go to the States. I thought it would ease off, but it never does.

When you go on holiday, if it’s not crashing face first onto a sun lounger for two weeks while people serve you a long list of improbably named cocktails, one of your jobs as a tourist is to observe things. You are both a part of what is going on and apart from it at one and the same time. This gives you the ability to think about and interrogate things in the way you don’t always do at home. It is very much the deeper end of Peter Kay in a Spanish supermarket shouting about Les Cadburys’ Fingerez. It’s why I ended up taking several photos of Dolly Parton’s ‘Yellow’ cake mix in a Walmart at ten o’clock at night and nearly bought an entire shelf full of candles with The Infant of Prague and Pope John Paul II on. You don’t get those up the Asda.

When I first went to the States, about twenty five years ago, there was a huge difference between life there and here. In the intervening years the gap has closed and keeps closing, for good things and bad. You would think it might make me feel less alien. It does not. But maybe that’s because I am conscious of feeling more alienated from life in the UK, too.

Some of that disconnect comes from being in a country that, Giant Redwoods apart, is just a baby. America is very much in its teenage years and even though it shouldn’t make a difference, I think the fact that you can’t find a building older than about two hundred years old in most places is energetically quite disconcerting to me. When I first met Jason, he lived in a cottage that was older than most American infrastructure. I am used to feeling the age of a place in a way that is fundamentally lacking in the States. It’s not a criticism, by the way. It’s just a thing that is true for me and it leaves me feeling rather unrooted.

Some of it comes from a very strong awareness that there are clearly places that are not suitable for tourists to go and that the consequences of going to them could be quite dire if you wander off piste and find yourself in the wrong neighbourhood. It’s not something I ever worry about here. That’s not to say that I gaily wander about in the dark, skipping through the rougher parts of London with a hey and a ho. I’m not an idiot, but the stakes, even if I did find myself somewhere questionable, seem somewhat lower here. It helps, of course, that I know where I am and where I’m going. I don’t have that familiarity elsewhere. It’s quite possible, on holiday to wander somewhere you shouldn’t, simply by reading the map wrong or getting off on the wrong freeway exit. As we moved around, I was so aware of how lacking I was in local knowledge, and how on edge that made me feel. In the cities in particular I found myself feeling quite oppressed. Even in the more touristy parts of Seattle, there was a fairly significant feeling of edginess that is completely lacking back home. In one shop we were in, Jason got bored and went to sit outside on a bench. When we had done and went back to the entrance, we found Jason inside, talking to the security guards. He had managed two minutes on the bench before someone started harassing him. The most harassment you’ll get here is from someone with a microphone trying to save your soul and get you up close and personal with Jesus.

One of the things that we couldn’t fail to notice on this trip was the huge rise in homeless people. In all the cities we visited, the numbers of people living in tents, under tarpaulins and out of shopping trolleys was significant. Along the way, in more rural areas, there were people living in RV’s everywhere. In smaller towns, as dusk fell, we drove through streets peppered with people appearing out of alleys, pushing carts and setting up tents. It was a different take on Nomadland and one that was far less romantic and hopeful.

In Seattle we attempted to park in one underground car park and left, because as we were circling, looking for a space, people were looming up out of the shadows, taking stock. It felt genuinely sinister. We had been told that car crime was rife and not to park our car on the street in any of the cities we visited, but we weren’t quite prepared for how difficult it was to find safe, off street parking. Seattle was, by far, the most challenging place we visited. I think it was such a shock because it was noticeably different from our last visit, in terms of how safe we felt. There were lots of empty shops and so many clearly distressed people. Seattle was the one city where we saw people openly using Fentanyl although we were told that Portland was much worse than Seattle for homelessness and drugs.

I’ve read Empire of Pain and watched All The Beauty and The Bloodshed. I’ve read Demon Copperhead, but nothing prepares you for seeing so many lost and desperate people. It’s heartbreaking.

In Portland, what struck us was the sheer number of people living on the streets. There were tents everywhere. As we drove through the city, there were whole encampments in the spaces between motorway bridges and off ramps. In San Francisco, as soon as you come off the main streets and cut across town, you’re in a world of people living in ruined caravans and under lengths of tarpaulin. It’s brutal.

It’s not that we’re better, here in the UK. We have drug problems and homelessness of our own. It’s just that as with all things, America does it bigger, for better or for worse. My sense was that the vestiges of the welfare state that the Tories haven’t eviscerated is the increasingly frayed line between the UK and the US. Free healthcare, universal credit, some vague approximation of mental health support and the fact that it’s considerably harder to get your hands on prescription opioids here are probably all that stand between us and what is happening in the States. And of course, there is the question of space. We are a densely populated isle. We don’t have the room for the levels of casual homelessness apparent in America. Where would we put everyone? If you put up a tent city under a bridge in London, they’d clear it out in no time. The four tents in the underpass near the marina were cleared out by the council after three months. God knows where the poor buggers went.

One woman we spoke to while we were away said: ‘Oh, that’s just in the city centres. Nobody goes there.’ She was a nice woman. She believed in socialised medicine. She acknowledged the problem, but her words were what I was left with. I get it. What can you do with a problem so big? You just walk away from it. It seemed like eventually, cities would just empty out until everyone who had some vestige of security would live in ever increasing suburbs. At least in America there is room for that to happen. God knows what will happen when we get there, and no doubt we will.

I nearly didn’t write about this. I have no answers and I am not standing in judgment. But, as per my last post. I wanted to write about the reality of what I experienced, not the Disney version. It feels wrong to be an observer. It feels wrong to be able to look and do nothing and walk away and go back to my comfortable life and know that I have a safety net, where others clearly don’t. But maybe there is power in being a witness and not just a voyeur. There but for the grace of God go I.